When using table tags to create a table it ends up creating a large amount of space above the table. So far the only way to remove the space is by placing everything in a single line though that makes it all very difficult to work with. Does anyone know of a way to remove the space without needing to do that?

No, the forums will insert a line break between every line as the input box is not a straight code editor. The best thing to do is just to create your table in some other program and remove the lines to paste into the forums, preserving a human-readable version to edit later if you need to.